Managing Crisis, Start a Membership Site And Streamline Your System

Effective business strategies from James Schramko:

Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:13 — 9.6MB)

Highlights:

Four Crisis management stages
Put up S.O.P.
Be quick to spot fire early
Tips for your membership site
Press releases that include a video are more effective
What makes a great press release?
Question everything
Study your competitors
Pointers for interviewing people
How to update files and systems

Download the PDF transcription

Transcription:
James Schramko here with a marketing news update.

Okay, I want to talk about crisis management. And if you’re the kind of person that’s always putting out fires then you may want to be aware of the four stages.

The first stage is when the kids are playing with the matches.
The second stage is when the flame has started and then things are just starting to burn.
The third stage, things are really flaring up.
And the fourth stage is completely out of control and there’s no saving it.

So a lot of managers, I see in this fourth and perhaps third stage where there’s just flames everywhere and it’s out of control. As a good leader and a good manager, what you want to be doing is spending a lot more time putting in standard operating procedures so that you don’t have kids playing with matches in the first stage. And certainly you want to be very quick to spot a fire.

Spot Fire Early In Your Business

So things like feedback mechanisms, doing spot checks, audits and process stop points to make sure that things are under control early are going to save you from getting those large flames. So a good manager is going to be spending a lot more time in stage 2 when there’s a very small fire that can easily be put out. Hopefully that helps you.

Here’s my tip if you have a membership site.
What you want to do is you want to have a founder’s member offer. So that you could have a lower price, say about this level pricing for people who give you their loyalty, who join up and take the risk and join in the early phase. What you do then is you put the price up and that way all of the people in the early low price are getting a recurring loyalty bonus for coming in early. And that increases your retention.

Now later on, your prices will be way higher and of course you can still offer some special allowances but you’ll never get to that founders member where they’re really feeling looked after and they tend to stick around.

With the membership if you can get that critical 2 or 3 month foundation member stick, or loyalty, then you’ll find that it’s much easier to maintain a solid steady consistent membership over the long period.

Here’s my tip for press releases.
If you get the opportunity to include a video, make sure you do. It gives it that much more media rich experience for people visiting that press release. So you have your text, and your call outs, and your headlines, but also you got that video right that people can have a look at. They can go along to your YouTube channel and discover more about you. They can see you and hear you, so it’s a much more compelling message than just having a plain text press release.

So seriously, a good press release these days is going to have a quote, it’s going to have a video, it going to have a logo and your picture and a contact for media inquiries which is the whole point right.

Here’s something that I suggest you do in your business if you’re looking for profit.
Go and revisit a lot of the assumptions that have cost you to have the business that you have right now.

What sort of assumptions are you making about your competitors, about your customers, about your vices, about the things that you could possibly do, about your team members?
All of these things are just assumptions that you’ve arrived at in the past. So go and question them, one of my mentors taught me, question everything. So really go back and have a look and ask yourselves these questions.

How can you operate differently within the market?
What else can you offer your customers if you’d have waved the magic wand?
What are your competitors doing that they’re missing out on that you can come in and take the opportunities?
How could you double, or triple, or quadruple your business this year by making changes with what you’ve already got?

I’ve seen it done before and it’s almost always when you get rid of some limiting belief, or assumption as I like to call it. We might also notice the word habit. But you want to question these things, you can learn new habits and you can build your business much stronger and much faster when you’re open minded to possibilities or break through.

Alright, so if you’re interviewing people and you should be interviewing people to get good content. Here are a few pointers.
One, be curious, be really curious and be just dying to know all about this person. How they did things. Why they got results.

Drill right in, ask the questions that someone would like you to ask if they were there because your audience is not there to ask the questions and that’s your job. Your job is to represent them and to think of what you should ask that they would be dying to know.

And as you go through an interview, try not to have too much structure. Open up, allow it to go where the interviewee and the interviewer takes it so that you can actually have a dynamic exploration. And if you can ask a few hard hitting questions that people are too scared to ask then you’ll quite often get some great material.

The other thing is to make sure that it’s entertaining. The last thing you want to do is bore people. It’s a sin. And I’m sure a small cat dies somewhere around the world every time you bore someone.

Here’s my final tip today, and it’s about updating your files and systems on your computer.
When I want to update or refresh, what I do is I go and make a new file and I actually call it #2. So let’s say I’m updating my training system. So I’ll go and put a new file and call it training2 and then I’ll move everything from training1 into training2 if I still need it. Now if I don’t need it then it stays there.

Eventually I can archive everything that’s left and that is now no longer required. So you want to keep the minimum possible files on your computer and you do that by updating the naming. Now when I want to update training2 you can guess what I’m going to call it. I’m going to call it training3 and I’m going to move only the things that I need into that new folder.

So that’s how you update your training system.

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